dogpossum

Albums.

A recent post on Melissa’s blog has made me think about jazz recordings again.

The album is a relatively recent phenomenon – the 50s or so is where it really happened (I think – I’m a bit fuzzy on this). We’ve really started thinking in new ways about collections of songs since digital downloading became a real possibility, and itunes recent reworking of their logo and approach to playing songs suggests that they think we don’t care about CDs or ‘albums’ the way we do. So now, in the 2010s, 50 years after albums became mainstream, we could say that we’ve gone back to thinking about individual songs rather than songs are part of albums.
I’m not sure I actually buy that idea. There are lots of people who, I’m sure, still think about albums, including the artists recording them, the record companies selling them, and the people who buy them on CD. This seems especially relevant for smaller independent bands who’re producing their own albums. But digital downloads – particular the legit sources where you buy songs individually – have reminded us of the significance of a single song as a stand alone recording or text.

I listen to jazz almost exclusively these days, and usually jazz from the 20s-40s, so I rarely think about that music in terms of albums. Unless I’m listening to a CD by a modern band. Or rather, I think about individual CDs or ‘albums’ of older jazz as just that – albums of individual items. They’re usually ‘curated’, by record companies or another third party, long after the song was originally recorded, released, played on the radio, forgotten and then dug up again by record companies looking to make a buck. The original artists didn’t think of these songs as part of an album of songs intended to be consumed as parts of a single, whole release. They thought of each song as a text that would be released on one side of a record and then bought by people who’d listen to them over and over until the grooves wore up and they had to buy a new one.

Individual releases of songs were often not even decided by the musicians themselves – the record company would choose the song they’d play, and the choose how and when and if it would be released. The ‘B-side’ song on the record could be from the same session or something completely different. The big sellers, particularly in the early days, were sheet music. A single song could also be recorded and ‘released’ by a number of bands in the same year, so the arrangement of the composition (the way the different instruments’ parts were organised within the performance of the song) became much more important than the original composition in many cases. Fletcher Henderson, for example, had a career as an accompanist for blues singers, as a big band leader and as an arranger for Bennie Goodman, and it was is arrangements with Goodman that really saw the largest, most rabid audiences. Really, the song itself (however it was arranged) was the important part, and audiences would hear it played not only on their records and in live radio performances, but by their local bands playing ‘the hits’.

Most of the songs I have bought recently from emusic are from ‘collected’ ‘albums’. The Chronological Classics ‘albums’ were just groups a series of recordings featuring one particular artist in chronological order on one CD. They’re really hard to buy on CD these days as they were produced by a now-defunct French company, so the downloads are invaluable. The Mosaic Records box sets are similarly just a series of recordings by one artist or band, usually listed on the CDs in chronological order. Even cheaper sets like the JSPs or Proper sets are much the same. The recording date becomes the organising principle.
I don’t think about them as ‘albums’. With jazz I tend to seek out recordings by a group of musicians (eg the young Chicago guys in the 20s) or by a particular musician (eg Bunny Berigan) sometimes grouped under a particular band leader (eg Count Basie or Artie Shaw), but not always. Or I’ll seek out different versions of a particular song, recorded literally hundreds of times by dozens of groups. Songs are often recorded more than once by the same artist or group, so you get revised versions of the song, where, once again, the recording date is the most useful piece of information for organising your listening and cataloguing of the song. The date, of course, also tells you who was in the band when it was recorded.
So ‘album’, again, doesn’t really work. Though there are some really good releases of remastered collections of songs. The Mosaic sets are a good example.

If I’m following a particular band chronologically (eg all the recordings by the Mills Blue Rhythm Band), the personnel in the band often changes according to location. These bands toured all the time so they recorded in a number of cities during a year. And the personnel would vary depending on where they were, who made it to the studio on time, which local musicians could be roped in to do a solo, or which stars were in the city and could be convinced (read: paid) to sit in.
This means that you often get wonderful little 3 or 4 song (possibly with 1 or 2 out takes) sessions recorded in one city by one incarnation of the ‘band’ on one day. Or, if you’re lucky, across two days. The term ‘band’, here, tends to fall apart. Some key artists played with the same band for years (Basie’s rhythm section in the 30s and 40s, Fats Waller’s small groups, Cab Calloway’s bigger bands), but it’s unusual to find a big band with exactly the same personnel for more than a year or so. If that. Individual musicians would drop out to do gigs with other bands, or wouldn’t be able to travel for a show. The musicians’ or band leader’s contract with a label or venue or promoter was renegotiated. The money ran short and some musicians had to be excluded. A musician was too hung over to get to the studio on time. Or too drunk to do more than one song. All sorts of things determined who sat in on a recording session.
And, most importantly, these bands were performing bands, doing live shows all the time, all over America. So recordings were complementing the live shows, not replacing them. As radio really took off in the late 20s and more in the 30s, live radio shows were often recorded and released years later. These shows yielded amazing clumps of songs recorded live, in one take. This emphasis on live performances actually affected the recordings they did. Bands would often rehearse relentlessly (especially if they were led by taskmasters like Goodman) so that their live performances were absolutely spot on. This meant that they were often so well drilled that their recordings were done in one, or at most two, takes. But recording was much more expensive then than now, and paying 15 men for more than an hour or two of recording in an expensive studio with an expensive engineer was beyond the budgets of many bands in the middle of a tour during the depression.
So those little 3 or 4 song sessions are absolute gold – the product of relentless practice and performance, tight arrangements and the unity of skilled musicians working with people they really clicked with. But you also get sessions of utter crap, with missed notes, rubbish arrangements and totally bullshit tired, cheesy instrumentation. These are all factors that often make it much easier to judge a session’s worth ahead of time if you know the musicians involved, and what they were doing with their lives at that point in time.
So these days I tend to think about those sessions as groupings reflecting that band at that moment. But they’re definitely not albums, as they were released as ‘singles’ or ‘sides’ – 2 songs, one on each side of a record. And the earlier stuff was limited to about 3.5 minutes.

It’s all very interesting. I have a lot more to write, including some stuff about who got to record what and how live gigs were parcelled out in cities like Chicago in the 20s. But I’m only just a little way into Kenney’s Chicago Jazz history which discusses these issues as they relate to Chicago specifically. I’m sorry this is such a crappy post, and I will try to rewrite it as something a bit more readable and interesting. Possibly with some nice 8track action to illustrate my points.